Excalibur finalist: Harmon Mitchell

Monday

Dec 2, 2013 at 5:00 AM

Rockford Register Star

Who or what inspires you to do what you do? I guess I have been taking an active part in most everything I could, ever since my mother, who was a teacher in our public school system, taught me the value of joining in and doing my best. She was my inspiration for always being optimistic and for being contributive and cooperative in my associations.

Since summer '64, when I met and fell hard for my wife, Diane, she has been my inspiration in all I do. Diane graduated from East High and was a teacher at Guilford before giving birth to and raising our four children. She then took on the task of coordinating foster care agencies in northern Illinois.

She and I agree that the future successes of our region rests with our youths, and we must do everything within our means to advocate for and encourage them to continue on a path to post-secondary education, return to their roots and become the kind of community leaders we need to be able to transform the Rock River Valley.

Your biggest challenge? Saying "no." So it becomes a question of time management, and it is an ongoing source of frustration for me. Fortunately, many good memories and many positives for the community have resulted from some of these time commitments over the years.

The most committed I have been in my life on a community project has been the time I have had the pleasure of spending while being a member of the Rockford School Board. I have been able to witness the needs of our schoolchildren, the needs of our teachers, and the needs of our public education administrators as they work hard to make our school system the best it can be.

If you had $1 million to give away, to whom or what would you give the money and why? I would make a $500,000 gift to the schools as an endowment to help provide college scholarships to deserving athletes. Many students, male and female, work just as hard at interscholastic sports as they do in the classroom. And even though they contribute a lot to the success of their school's teams, they just don't quite qualify for full-college recruitment overtures. Scholarship money would help these scholar-athletes attend various colleges and universities of their choice.

The other half would be given to Youth Services Network to help it in its mission to expand services to at-risk kids in the Rock River Valley. Their work with these kids includes foster care supervision, truancy intervention and many hours spent in community engagement on behalf of our youth.

Name something positive in the Rock River Valley that you'd like to see further developed: We need to do as much as we can to improve the effectiveness of our public school education processes. Positives, in initial stages of development, are Early Childhood programs, elementary school zones, middle school preparation for the new high school academies, and the ever-important seventh-hour initiative and how it adds to new curriculums for students.

Recent accomplishments in the School District reflect on a wonderfully upbeat feeling in our community. They include the attractive and vibrant Administration Building on Seventh Street, and the additions being completed on six elementary schools. Yes, the District 205 education offered today is something Rockford can be proud of … yet there is more we can do. We can work together to help develop relationships between business and industry, which can provide advocacies for our teachers and our students.

What needs to happen for the region to reach, develop, train and retain our brightest students? Local districts can continue to recruit qualified, diverse educators and develop them to the best of their abilities to work with our students. School administrations can develop more partnerships with local businesses and industry, which should offer more opportunities to better communicate all that they do to prepare students for an early start on a career or a head-start toward higher education.

Local companies that provide products for the aerospace industry need students to help fill technically oriented positions in their facilities — engineers, technicians, machinists, tool-builders — and our school system can play a huge part in helping to fill this need. That's why we must continue to reach, develop, train and retain as many of our bright students as we can.

Profile

Name: Harmon Mitchell

Age: 75

Residence: Rockford

Occupation: Retired from LaSalle Bank as first vice president/wealth management. Previously was vice president of marketing for American Hotel Motel Brokers, president of H.L. Mitchell & Associates, and a sales and marketing consultant to various businesses.

Community involvement: Sharefest, painting at Jefferson High School this year. RPS 205 Golf Outing Committee. Scorer at the CDGA State Amateur Golf Tournament at Aldeen Golf Course. Member of the RAEDC Education Committee and Alignment Rockford's Career and College Pathways Committee. Team captain at Alignment Rockford's Academy Expo in September, attended by almost 5,000 students. Involved in resurrecting the Rockford Public Schools Foundation as a way that ex-District 205 students will have for "giving back" to the community where they grew up and by gifting to a foundation that will benefit schools where they spent their formative years.

What the nominator said: "Harmon's unselfish and unpaid volunteerism and community leadership has stakeholders finally feeling good about Rockford's public schools and about living and working in Rockford." — Patrick Derry